Marcin Shipped WP Multitool, 10x’ed the Price, and Proved Developers Will Pay for Respect

Meet Marcin Dudek.

Marcin is a Poland-based WordPress developer. 15+ years in PHP, started part-time back in 2010 and never really stopped. He's a Toptal freelancer, and runs his own studio - We Got This. He spends most of his week inside other people's slow WordPress sites figuring out why they're slow.

Marcin just shipped WP Multitool - one plugin that replaces the five or six optimization plugins most developers juggle. Instead of writing the usual polished, everything-worked-out success story, he's handling the Fake Mayo readers the honest version: what it does, why it probably shouldn't be this easy, and the part where he launched at $50, then raised the price tenfold to $499 to see if anyone would flinch.

A quick word from my sponsor before Mark shares his story below

Startupik
Where Founders Actually Learn How to Make Money

Most startup content sounds smart but doesn’t help you move forward. Startupik is different. It breaks down exactly how startups get users, grow fast, and make real money - using simple, clear examples from AI tools, SaaS products, and real founders. No confusing terms, no empty talk - just practical ideas you can use right away to build and grow your own startup.

Visit to startupik.com

Most of the tools "fixing" WordPress performance are guessing.

You install a caching plugin. It hides the slow page behind a static copy. The page is still slow underneath - you just stopped looking at it. That's fine until you hit the admin, or a logged-in user, or checkout on WooCommerce, and suddenly there's nothing to cache and the site crawls again.

I do this for a living. Client sends me a site, it's slow, and I go digging. For years that meant installing five or six separate plugins - one for the database, one for autoload, one for query monitoring, one for cron, one for images - running them, reading the output, then uninstalling them so they didn't become the next problem. It's tedious. And half of them just tell you "you have 200 revisions" without telling you which query is actually eating 400ms on every page load.

So I built WP Multitool. One plugin, 18 modules, and you turn on only the ones you need. Disabled modules add zero overhead - they don't even load.

Here's the part I still find fun.

When it finds a slow query, it doesn't guess. It runs EXPLAIN on it - the same thing a database admin does by hand - and shows you exactly why the query is slow and which index would fix it. No external API. No sending your data to some cloud service to be "analyzed". It all runs locally on your server, rule-based, offline. Your database never leaves the box.

And there's a module I'm weirdly proud of: it shows real benchmark data for every plugin you have installed, right there on the WordPress plugins page. Score, memory, query count.

That data comes from MakeWPFast, where I benchmarked around 52,000 plugins and themes - the ~5,000 most common ones show up right there next to the plugin name. So instead of arguing about which plugin is the pig, you just look.

That's the whole idea. Measure it, show why it's slow, fix it.

Honestly, it's for me. I built the tool I wanted to have open on every client site.

But it turns out "me" is a lot of people - freelancers and agencies managing a stack of WordPress sites who are tired of the same routine.

You enable “Autoloader Optimizer”, it finds the pile of junk some abandoned plugin dumped in wp_options and never cleaned up. You run the “Slow Query Analyzer”, it points at the one query dragging your load time. “Site Doctor” scans for the dumb production misconfigurations we all ship by accident. “Database Optimizer” clears the transient bloat and the orphaned meta.

It's unglamorous work. It's also the work that actually makes a site fast, and it was scattered across too many tools.

I didn't do a big-bang launch. I don't really believe in them.

I built it in the open, shipped constantly, and put it in front of the people already in my orbit: my newsletter, my own client work, developers who follow what I do on WordPress performance.

I priced it low to start and raised it hard later, once it had earned that. More on those numbers below.

I'm writing this while it's still very much in motion, so I'll give you the honest state of things rather than a tidy retrospective.

I'll be straight with you: I don't have a viral-launch chart to show off, and I'm not going to invent one.

Here's what's real. WP Multitool is 18 modules, on version 1.5, and I've shipped somewhere around 46 releases getting them right - most of that is me running it on client sites and fixing whatever annoyed me that week.

What I won't do is paste a "442ms to 38ms" hero number and pretend it's typical. Fixing autoload bloat and one bad query genuinely takes seconds off a page - I see it on real sites - but I haven't sat down and done a clean, public before/after case study yet. Until I do, I'd rather tell you that than fake a chart.

Now the sales, exact, no rounding.

I put the lifetime license up on February 4th 2026 at $50. Early-bird price, deliberately cheap - and it sold 43 copies in five weeks. On March 12th 2026 I raised it to $499. Ten times the price. I did it because the tool had earned it and I was tired of underselling it - and it kept selling: ten more at $499 over the next three months.

Since then I've added a $9 Lite tier (7 sold) and a $199/year plan (5 sold).

That's 65 orders. Five people asked for a refund and got it, no questions - the other 60 stuck. A bit over $6,500 kept, all of it with no ads and no launch stunt, just developers finding it and deciding it was worth the money.

That $50-to-$499 jump still surprises me.

I braced for the sales to stop dead the day I changed the number. They didn't - ten people bought at $499 anyway. Launching cheap probably made it look like a toy. The higher price made it look like what it already was.

Two things I'm fairly sure about, even this early.

First: developers will pay for a tool that respects them. No dark patterns, no "unlock this for $99", no phoning your data home. Just show me the cause and the fix, run it locally, and let me keep my sites fast. That's the whole pitch, and it's enough.

Second: you don't need to replace the thing everyone's using. I didn't try to out-cache the caching plugins. WP Multitool works one layer underneath them, on the part they can't touch - the boring layer most tools skip because it's harder to make look pretty.

I'm pushing WP Multitool and MakeWPFast closer together - the plugin reads the benchmark data, and I want that loop tighter, so the moment a plugin drags your site the tool already knows and tells you what to do about it.

More modules are coming, but only the ones I actually reach for. I'm not padding a feature list.

I'm also adding a single-site license to the site. Right now every edition runs on unlimited sites, which is great if you're an agency but overkill if you've just got the one - so there'll be a cheaper way in for people who only need it on a single site.

If you run WordPress sites for a living, it's at WP Multitool. Lite is $9 one-time to get in, and the paid editions run on unlimited sites. Turn on a module, watch it find something you didn't know was there.

Keep shipping.

See you next time.

Thanks,
Jakob Jelling

I’m on X. Come out and play.